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There is a peculiar moment that every seasoned traveller will recognise: the instant when a train pulls out of a station in an unfamiliar country and you realise, with a jolt somewhere between panic and delight, that nobody within a thousand miles knows exactly where you are. For some people this is the whole point of travel. For others it is precisely what they seek to avoid, which is why the package tour, with its air-conditioned coach and laminated itinerary, has never gone out of fashion despite decades of being mocked by more adventurous types.
The two camps have long regarded each other with a kind of affectionate contempt. The independent traveller tends to see the package tourist as someone who has paid handsomely to be herded from one gift shop to the next without ever brushing up against the country they have ostensibly come to see. The package tourist, meanwhile, tends to regard the independent traveller as someone who spends half their holiday lost, the other half haggling over the price of a bus ticket, and comes home with a stomach bug rather than a set of decent photographs. Both caricatures, inevitably, contain a grain of truth and miss a good deal besides.
What is rarely acknowledged is how much the two approaches have converged. Even the most committed backpacker now books hostels through an app days in advance and checks reviews before setting foot on a night bus, which would have struck an earlier generation of shoestring travellers as faintly ridiculous, if not outright cheating. Meanwhile, tour operators have noticed that today's clients want less time in gift shops and more time doing something that will look convincing on social media, so itineraries increasingly include a morning with a local family or an afternoon foraging for wild herbs with a chef. Authenticity, it turns out, sells rather well once it has been packaged correctly, a fact that would no doubt amuse the anthropologists who first popularised the term.
None of this is to say that all forms of travel have become interchangeable. A fortnight spent cycling alone through a country whose language you barely speak will change you in ways that a well-organised coach tour, however thoughtfully curated, is unlikely to match. But it would be a mistake to assume that spontaneity is automatically more virtuous than planning, or that discomfort is a prerequisite for insight. The traveller who returns home altered is not necessarily the one who suffered the most delays or ate the strangest food, but the one who paid attention, wherever the itinerary happened to take them, and however it was arranged.